g caught Langham's ear. He was absorbed in the
dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of
himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.

'But I love her!--I love her! A little courage--a little effort--and I
too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere
contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me
back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not
forced her love--it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it,
if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope
thrown to him?'

To which the pale spectre self said scornfully--

'_Courage_ and _effort_ may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary.
They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two
others--_habit_ and _character_. Slave as you are of habit, of the
character you have woven for yourself out of years of deliberate
living--what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can
recreate! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden,
but for God's sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you
with theirs!'

'But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so
warm a heart! Poor child--poor child! I have played on her pity. I have
won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face--oh
monstrous--oh inhuman!' and the cold drops stood on his forehead.

But the other self was inexorable. 'You have acted as you were bound to
act--as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true
human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the
critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What
in God's name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such
ambitions? You are poor--you must go back to Oxford--you must take up
the work your soul loathes--grow more soured, more embittered--maintain
a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted,
and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even
that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from
the world! Think of the little house--the children--the money
difficulties--she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,--you
incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull
rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck--submit